The first Akshaya Patra-OneWorld Media Fellowships on Hunger – 2012 were announced today. The recipients of the Fellowships are Soma Basu of The Statesman, Sarada Lahangir of the Women Features Service, Nivedita Jha from the Dainik Jagran daily newspaper’s Patna edition, Mahesh Suresh Sarlanshkar of the Maharashtra Times and Ratna Bharali Talukdar of  India Together.

The fellows were selected by an eminent jury comprising of MK Venu, Managing Editor of the Financial Express newspaper, Kiran Mehra-Kerpelman, Director of the UN Information Centre for India and Bhutan, Gurdeep Singh Sappal, CEO of Rajya Sabha TV, Britannia’s Category Director for Health and Wellness, Anuradha Narasimhan, and, Dr Sheila C Vir, Director of the Public Health Nutrition and Development Centre.

While it is meant to help young, mid-career journalists further their understanding on the complex subject, the Fellows will also write on the subject for their respective publications. The fellowship includes travel opportunities to remote villages and districts of the country that are home to extreme hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity.

The fellowship also gives the young journalists an opportunity to look at the issues of hunger through other prisms of development. For instance, the journalists will be able to see how the mid-day meals have addressed the issue of malnutrition among children and how and if hunger has abated school drop-outs.

The Akshaya-Patra-OneWorld Media Fellowships on Hunger – 2012 has been instituted by the Akshaya-Patra Foundation and OneWorld South Asia for furthering the debate on the issues of hunger, malnutrition and food security. These issues confirm to the first goal of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).